We’ve gone after a lot of high profile figures in our long and sordid history of mini-comic demagoguery, but maybe none that we (or at least I) held in higher personal esteem than Steve Ignorant. The crazy part was that we actually got to meet Steve in person and tried to hand him the comic… I say tried, because he wouldn’t take it!!! He took some other comics (the “Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Let’s Do It, Let’s Fucking Die” group mini and a mini of Mikey’s that I forgot the title of), but he wouldn’t take the comic we drew about him! Fucking suck!

I suppose I should provide a little context… So a couple weeks ago, Steve Ignorant (lead singer of the seminal anarcho punk band Crass) came to San Francisco to play a “retrospective”/”best of” of Crass songs with a band calling themselves the Last Supper or some such what not (I would link to them, but they don’t seem to have much of an identity outside of being Steve Ignorant’s victory lap vanity project). Now a lot people were upset that:

Steve Ignorant was playing Crass songs without any of the other original members of the band

That he was playing at a venue (Slim’s) that charged $21 dollars for a ticket

That he was playing at a venue (Slim’s) that was 21+

Edit: I’m being informed that Slim’s is an all age venue by someone named Matt in the comments. I’ve actually been to Slim’s before myself (to see the Melvins one time and the Breeders another), but I guess I never really remembered what their age policy was. Honestly, I don’t really give a shit either, but corrections where corrections are due.

And these people were staging a protest / show outside of Slim’s on the very same night! With their very own tour bus! and glossy flyers!

Obviously this was a divisive issue with a lot of self-righteousness and dogmatism being expressed on both sides of the aisle, so of course, Mission Mini-Comix decided to draw up a devil’s advocate style pamphlet that would piss off folks on all sides of the issue (it’s what we do). I think a lot of the folks there were confused by our presence, as we weren’t really taking a strong side for or against what Steve was doing. Steve himself automatically assumed our comic would just be totally ragging on him (not true! we ragged on all kinds of people) and didn’t want to even read our comic. He went off about how he was actually losing money on the tour so all the protesters who said he was just doing it for the money were full of it. It was weird being in that position, because I felt we were articulating the protesters view points much more directly to him than the protesters themselves did, despite not holding the protesters strong convictions. It was unfortunate Steve couldn’t have more of a sense of humor about it, but whatever, it was cool meeting him and I’m glad he ended up taking some of our other comics.

The protesters seemed much more friendly to our cause, although a number of them were suspicious we were trying to hand out Jesus mini-comix…

Mike drew the first, third, fifth, and seventh panels, I drew the second and last panel, “Kate Silver” drew the fourth panel and Erin Ruch drew the sixth panel.